Karate: Unsolved

So this is what emerges from the cocoon. With their album, In Place of Real Insight, they took that Dischord sound and ran it through an emo filter. Then on The Bed is In the Ocean they took that emo sound and ran it through the jazz filter. Now on this album they emerge as the band they were always bound to become, a modern jazz band. Now, I really don’t dig on jazz. But for some reason, this thing works for me. It’s just a cool record. It was my early version of the next absolutely cool album I heard, Spoon’sGirls Can Tell. It somehow made jazz listenable to me. Perhaps it’s the vocals or the lack of endless solos, but these songs, with their lack of verse chorus verse just kind of envelopes you like a calm wave and makes you want to wear a beret and smoke a pack of something harmful.